Saturday, July 11, 2009

This was our very first camping trip. We rented a camper and stayed at the Lone Duck Campground, which was great. We had really nice neighbors, and everyone there was super friendly. We brought the dogs, and they did great. We went to the Florissant Fossil Beds on Saturday, which was really cool. We were only able to hike a couple of the trails, but I'll definitely go back to do the rest. For everyone back home who is curious, the fossil beds were named after Florissant, MO, because the man who discovered them was from Missouri. Pretty cool. Basically millions of years ago there was a huge lake in the area, as well as a volcano. When the volcano erupted, the flow of mud, magma, whatever it was covered the bottom 15 feets of the huge Redwood trees in the area. Everything above the flow eventually died and went away, but the bottom of the trees petrified. The ash settled on the bottom of the lake and helped preserve the plants and animals that had died and settled to the bottom, leaving a lot of fossils in the area. It was really neat. We didn't stay long because they were closing soon and we were both hungry, but I'll go back.